Moving is an exciting time in a person’s life, whether it’s your first move or your twentieth. You could be moving to a new city, moving in with a new roommate, or renting your first apartment solo…whatever it is: moving requires a lot of time, work, and boxes….along with the exciting experience. This is why many people decide to get some help.

We’ve had a few visitors write us asking about tenant rights and how to protect those rights, so we took a little time to write down a few suggestions. We share these suggestions down below. Keep in mind, tenant rights vary from state to state and the suggestions we share with you are very basic. For a complete list of your rights in your state, please visit the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development tenant rights page.

Investment Instruments Corporation (IIC), the only company devoted to increasing transparency in the real estate market, today released its Q1 Rental Report for 2008, comparing rental rates in Q1 2007 with Q1 2008.

For those of you looking for a new city to live in, Cooking Light recently ranked major metropolitan cities on 15 different criteria, calculated on a per-capita basis, then grouped into categories–eat smart, be fit, live well–and factored on a four-point scale. Here are the cities listed in order with what Cooking Light has to say about that particular city(click the city name to view the apartments in that city):

For the first time ever, a city not named Los Angeles has been named America’s “sootiest” city. Soot, also known as particle pollution, is one of the categories the American Lung Association uses to determine the most polluted cities in the country. Pittsburgh overtook Los Angeles in the category that measures short-term particle pollution or soot.

Moving is hardly ever an inexpensive or easy endeavor, but if you’ve decided upon moving yourself; renting a moving truck can save you money, car/truck trips, gas, and lots of valuable time. Here’s some valuable info on what you need to know about renting a moving truck:

Apparently, Nigerian con artists have taken to Craigslist in search of uneducated internet users who will unknowingly send their money(deposit) for an apartment rental that doesn’t even exist. Here’s how the scam works, you think you’re looking at a legitimate apartment ad. The images of the apartment, both inside and out, look great, the neighborhood is good and most importantly the price is right. Lots of times, these images are from a real location, a location the scam artist scoped out in advance, sometimes these fake apartment ads even contain a real address. People in search of an apartment drive by the address, decide they like the apartment and send their deposit in before ever seeing the inside of the rental property. This deposit they are sending in, is actually going to some scum bag in Nigeria who makes a living by ripping people off. The real owners of the apartment they think they just secured, they have no clue this took place. On top of all this, these con artists are having potential tenants fill out a credit application, which is turn opens up the possibility of credit fraud and identity theft.

The US Census bureau is reporting today that New Orleans, hard-hit by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, was the fastest-growing large city in the nation between July 1, 2006, and July 1, 2007. This follows the city having the largest rate of population loss since 2000.

We just released RSS feeds for all our cities. Just go to the city and subscribe to the RSS feed on that page, the link is listed on the left hand side of the city page. Subscribing to an RSS feed will allow you to keep on top of the newest apartments listed on MY Apartment Map. Our apartment listings update several time a day so if you are actively seeking an apartment this may save you some time.

I just finished coding a new feature for the site. It’s an RSS Feed Builder for Apartments. You just select the location you want to search for apartments, the search radius in miles, and then enter the specifics about the apartment you are looking for.

It appears that no industry is safe from the economic downturn. According to Yahoo! Finance rents are down and vacancies are up across many metro areas. My question is, where are people living? Are lower end apartments seeing a decrease in vacancies?

After reading the horrible unemployment numbers that were released today, I started to wonder what states had the highest unemployment benefits. I found a recent AP article that listed the benefits per state, but it was not ajusted by cost of living. So I took the CPI for every state and ran it against the unemployment numbers. Here is what I got.
Top 10 States

Yesterday we released a new Rental Data tool on MyApartmentMap. You can use this tool to find the average rents in almost any area. You simply go to the city your interested in, for example you might want to see New York City Rental Statistics, and drag the marker around to see the minimum, maximum and average rents in that area.

MyApartmentMap has been in development for around 3 years. The frontend is written in PHP using a custom framework. As we continue to add more features the site becomes more and more difficult to maintain with the current PHP codebase. The backend of MyApartmentMap is written completly in Python which I greatly prefer to PHP. Python is built from the ground up to be object oriented and the syntax is very short and easy to understand.

The MyApartmentMap Dirtiest Apartment Contest is live! Do you live like a slob or just haven’t had the time to clean your apartment? Well, now is your chance to be rewarded for your lack of cleanliness and or laziness. We will be giving away three prizes:1st: $1,000, 2nd: $500, 3rd: $300.